'Social inequality, the 1%, and why your rent is so high' Danny Dorling

Often people find it hard to equate the growing income and wealth of the best-off 1% in society with any harm being done to them. It has become routine to be told that in fact you benefit from the wealth that the best-off 1% miraculously create, the jobs they produce as a result of their wealth creating prowess and the happiness that is sprinkled around and about as a result. However, when rich nations are compared something odd becomes apparent. In those countries where the 1% take the most a disproportionately high number of people tend to be imprisoned, much larger numbers struggle on low pay, median pay is lower, housing costs tend to be higher, mental health is – in general – worse and the wealth of much of the population is debt, not wealth. Levels of debt tend to be highest in affluent countries where the 1% take the most. And often that debt is taken out to try to secure housing, or just pay other costs when and where

The economic geography of the World as imagined by Peter Taylor and viewed from Houston

To clarify add detail – (E. Tufte)

But you can have too much

Images can be too complex What a generation older than you were most likely to go on to do (compared to the average) /publications/12tribes.html

If everyone steps down together those at the bottom suffer most It can help to ask simple questions Such, as: Are we unusual?

OTHER LARGE EU COUNTRIES ARE SIMILAR TO EACH OTHER, NOT UK Table 1five countries 2012 – FOR HOUSEHOLDS 1% CUTOFF Median Ratio Germany€154,000€36, France€189,000€39, Italy€164,000€33, Spain€105,000€22, UK€227,000€36, Source: calculations by Author EU-SILK weighted household sample NOTE – THIS IS BEFORE HOUSING COSTS! / (&Size)

Different countries went in different directions from the late 1970s 6.7% to be in the 1% In the Netherlands in 2012

During 2013 housing prices in London rose by around £40,000 for an average flat or house that was sold as compared to the previous year. This brought the cost of a typical London home sold on the market up to just above £475,000. If this rate of change continues the half million pound price barrier will be breached during Area = rise in prices: Area = land: Our housing bubble appears driven by rising inequality and the super rich

The UK has a more unequal income distribution than Israel, only three countries of the richest 25 do worse. Returning to 1918 levels:

Now redraw the population map to make area = the wealth of the richest 1000 people most of whom are in London… as are all ten of those who have most

Even the super-rich can feel poor 24 people

It is not too few homes From Figure 6 of: Relative housing inequality: The decline and return of housing space inequality in England and Wales, Rebecca Tunstall Director, Centre for Housing Policy, University of York (in press) Inequality in distribution of rooms per person for people in private households in England and Wales, percentile ratios,

It is a ‘choice’: There are a huge range of choices to be made over the way forward

And why do people argue for a living wage when they don’t have living rents? There are now many hundreds of recent academic studies that link poor housing and insecure housing to poor and worsening health in many ways, but each study is of necessity about a particular place, time and group. Each tends to be so idiosyncratic that a meta analysis of multiple studies may not be much more valuable than simply listing them. Some key suggestions (with the aim of reducing housing costs): 1.End ‘help to buy’ (help to bubble, help for votes) 2.Better share out what we have (empty rooms/homes) 3.5 year tenancy agreements as Shelter suggest 4.Remove tax relief and properly tax landlords 5.And enforce criminal law on housing quality

For many issues we have societal choice (such as Walking and Cycling) How do we compare? Human life on earth

But we can set a very bad example The lights are turning on all the way up the Nile, as people crowd into less and less space …To finish with let’s look at what happens when you take a composite of many satellite images like this and draw them over the map of the planet, but with that map stretched to give everyone equal space so we can see who is wasting light and who is not (or has none)? media-live/photos/000/620/overrides/new- view-earth-at-night-nile_62008_600x450.jpg

Cartography by Ben Hennig At the end of 2012 NASA updated its image of the sky at night. Cairo/Alexandria appeared to shine brighter than Tokyo. This map will grow, it needs to become duller. A few years earlier the world map looked like this…

The UK is just a tiny part of the world - Getting smaller …

And you are living on the edge of the world, not its centre 7 billion people rising to 10 billion in your lifetime By 2100 the UK will shrink in size, but if we are lucky we’ll house more at less cost…